By evening, Michelle had tired herself out mentally, and while she'd been able to reproduce the deflecting strike a few times, she had no answer for why it was sometimes flickering aura through her arm and shoulder. Hikari... well, it was hard to know what value the practice was to her Minion without seeing her in action, but she had been too full of her own thoughts to really want to try any kind of battle practice.

  Returning to her body had her discover that Nin had tried calling a couple times through the afternoon. She hadn't really thought about the fact that her Avatar didn't have access to either her phone or messenger. She supposed that next time, she should leave them with the assistant instead of sealed away.

  She exited the practice room to find that the Fool's Run lobby had displays going, showing an ongoing match. That got her attention, and she went around to the seating side of the lobby and ordered a large cheese-covered pretzel from one of the carts, splitting her attention between that, the displays, and calling Nin back.

  "Hey Chelle," she finally heard, after a moment. "Sorry, I'm cooking dinner right now. I'll put you on speaker."

  "That's fine." She received her pretzel, faster than she'd expected, and found a seat. "I didn't get your calls because I was in the practice room again, trying to teach Hikari."

  "How'd it go?" Nin's voice sounded a little distant, now, but she still came through clearly enough.

  Michelle let herself start and finish another bite before answering. "Pretty well actually. There's a lot of stuff there that we haven't explored. Stuff like how minions advance their stats, and setting their starting stats, all of that."

  "I guess if we get serious about the Run, we'll have to learn all of that." Nin sounded perhaps distressed, or distracted, or just a little unsure whether that was something she wanted. Or maybe nothing at all. Michelle decided just to not try to read her friend's tone of voice, especially while she was on speakerphone.

  "I'm sure most of the people in the novice brackets don't think too hard about it either," she answered after a moment, then took another bite. She heard Nin scraping something against a pot.

  "No," Nin answered after a moment. "Probably a lot of the lower brackets will be people like us, just trying something new and not sure if it's what they want to get involved with yet."

  People like us. Michelle was surprised to find that, somewhere inside of her, she rebelled at that categorization of her. Why? Sure, she kind of thought that there was something waiting for her to find in the Run, but that was a guess. She'd only played one match so far. Even knowing what Jerry had told them...

  "You okay?" Nin sounded a little concerned.

  "Just distracted," Michelle deflected. "I'm in the Run lobby and they're showing footage of an ongoing match, and I'm not sure why."

  "An ongoing match?" Nin filled her voice with disbelief. "I hope they don't do something like that without asking."

  "Probably not," she agreed. "It looks like it's late in a match... unless it's a high-Alpha one. The level I saw flashing past was like 270. If they're going to 300, that means they're pretty close."

  Someone near her piped up at that. "400," he said, and she turned to look at him. "But both sides have already suffered a knockout, and one side has suffered two. So, nobody's going to get past 300."

  Michelle repeated most of that, a little quietly, and then asked the speaker, "Why is it on display?"

  "It's a ladder match, somewhere in the bottom half of the Low Runners." He paused, and glanced at her, probably to see if she understood, then he continued. "If you want to fight on the leader board, you have to consent to others watching your match. Mostly, that's in private viewing rooms, but when a match looks like it's going to finish, sometimes they'll put it up in the lobby."

  "You're busy so we'll talk later," Nin suddenly said in her ear, and then hung up. Michelle pulled the phone away and glanced at it, but decided it was probably for the best, and put it away.

  "So they're putting it up because it's going to affect the leader boards?" Not that Michelle didn't understand what she'd been told, but she had only been paying so much attention. She still was only paying so much attention, because she was hungry, and the pretzel was delicious.

  "Yeah," he said, gesturing. "Really, it's complicated, because teams are complicated, but Team Lemongrass – that's the left-hand players, who are losing – they should be defending their spot against Team Caper. And they were doing okay, despite their first knockout being like a hundred levels ago."

  That... was certainly interesting, enough that she focused in on the screens that hovered in the air. There were a lot of complexities, some of which she didn't exactly understand. The territory control was obvious, and the big X's through three of the runner portraits were clear enough. But there was an oddly colored area near the middle that looked out of place, and that was just the most obvious question mark.

  "What's that white zone in the middle?" she asked, wondering if her neighbor would explain.

  He glanced at her, and nodded. "You're still pretty new?"

  "One match so far, but we're learning."

  He nodded again. "It's a prize lair. They show up sometimes along the mid-line, based on a random skill. You won't see them below two Alpha, more likely at three and up. If you beat the lair boss, it disappears, so there's some meta there. Whether or not it's a good skill determines if people jump on it or ignore it." He gestured at the screen. "They're clearly ignoring it. I didn't get a look at what it is, though."

  "Normal rarity magic skill," someone nearby said. "Ice element, but you can tell that much from the terrain."

  A couple people glanced at the speaker, but then everyone refocused on the screens.

  Even Michelle could tell the game was not going well for Team Left.

  They'd lost their midfield and the center laner, and from the look of the map, both those headquarters had been near each other. According to the symbols by their portraits, one of the dead was also their Commander, though there was another Commander symbol now. The screens didn't say who was their King, but it hardly mattered. The four remaining Right-side runners were all-in, working alongside a whole lot of Minions and not a few Flunkies; the Left had two headquarters in a group and one vaguely behind them, all currently under siege. To Michelle, it didn't look like the kind of fight Left could come back from.

  One of Team Left seemed to be charging a skill, which seemed ridiculous under the circumstances, but five minutes later when they got it off, nobody was laughing. It was some kind of high level earth magic, which erupted under the biggest concentration of invading troops, slaughtering many of the Minions and all of the Flunkies. One of the Runners also got hit by it, but he limped to safety, quickly covered by two more.

  The left used that as a moment to rally. They'd had minions respawn but remain hidden, but now they pulled out all the stops, charging into the broken terrain left over from the earth element attack to try to take out the weakened enemies. That mostly worked, but another Left-side runner got dead in the process, pincered between the weakened Right runner and one of the others.

  She checked the woman's respawn timer. It was way too high; she'd be out far too long to make any more difference in this battle. That, plus the fact that they didn't get a kill on the right-side runner seemed a death knell, and Team Left seemed to realize it.

  The only other Left-side runner that was part of that battle fell, leaving only the one who'd charged up the earth magic ability, and he was not enough to turn the tide. Pretty quickly, the front pair of Headquarters fell, resulting in two more Knockouts.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Despite what she had guessed, one of those two was the King, which made the match over.

  Quickly, the displays were covered by the Fools Run logo, and then they transitioned into informational displays about the match statistics and consequences. Michelle boggled at the size of the pot; apparently, leader board matches had a large ante, on top of four-Alpha being a fairly large multiplier. She examined the various spoils, then frowned and checked again. There was one extra skill attributed to the teams that wasn't a Take, but it was attributed to a Prize Lair, plus a note about the later Prize Lair that hadn't been taken. Ice storm. Area of effect ice element, common rarity. But those were the only special notes in the Skills display.

  Right. She'd heard about High Runners, and her neighbor had said this was a match between Low Runners. So they wouldn't be mixing skills, or whatever it was called. That was a little disappointing; there was plenty of stuff to master in the Fool's Run, clearly, but it seemed to her that learning to mix skills was almost the point of the Run itself. Or... maybe learning to level better was. Or both. Jerry would gladly take credit for anything useful that came out of it, of course.

  She glanced around, but the man who'd talked to her had already gone. Almost all attention had turned away from the screens, now, and although she caught snippets of conversation that sounded like they were about the match, they all sounded more like they were talking about sports than Dungeoneering.

  Which... the Run was a sport, she supposed. Even without the leader board, it was team versus team matches. It was probably natural that some people would focus in on the competitive aspect. But something about that thought only made her feel like the Run was further from her grasp, further out of her control. That... made no sense to her. Of course it was out of her control. But, as she'd started to understand it a little, she'd hoped...

  Michelle bit her lip, tried to forcefully clear her head, and got up to go. She had one run. It wasn't that important. If it was ever going to become important, it wasn't yet. If she was ever going to become important, she wasn't yet. And she'd probably never be that.

  That was a sour note to leave on, but it wasn't wrong. Couldn't be wrong. She knew what she was, and it was a damn large world out there. As she passed out of the Run lobby and into the Alpha entry hall, Michelle felt something odd about the energy in the room, but she wasn't interested in trying to figure it out.

  She found herself thinking for most of the way home that she wished she were already back in the Run, and it surprised her. But, she also didn't want to think too hard about it. Running had been stressful, as that Lauren woman had said. And she knew that it was harder on Nin than normal Dungeoneering. Nin had always been more of a back-liner, and the constant combat of the Run was something she was less used to. Nor did Michelle blame her.

  And the Run had lots of parts of it that sucked. The first few levels were agonizing, especially before she could unseal her Skill and her sword. Having to play the resource grinding game was also a pain in the ass. But...

  But the fights had felt right, in a way she couldn't quite put into words. She kind of understood it, but mostly didn't. Everyone had been made mechanically equal, everyone got all the same opportunities as each other. Not just at the start, but at every moment, they were peers, equals, not some group that was miles behind or ahead of her. And she'd been surprised to find herself so far ahead, when it came down to it. Jerry had said something about true skill, but she'd not really listened. She thought she understood it then, and she kind of thought she understood it now. But she couldn't help wondering if she'd missed something.

  She'd find out. After all, the tutorial match had been against NPCs. When she started to go up against real Runners, people with experience, then she'd see. Although it seemed kind of unlike her, she found herself wanting that. Wanting to test herself.

  It had been a while since she'd felt that way.

  Michelle found herself cooking when she got back to her apartment, not because she was eager for any of her half-decent recipes, but because she found herself moving automatically, and didn't really want to stop. She had just about done cooking a salmon and rice recipe (using Dungeon-sealed fish, one of the many blessings of her Inventory) when Nin called back.

  "Hey Nin," she said, aware how distracted she sounded.

  "Sorry I took a while to get back to you." Nin did sound a bit chagrined. "Reese and I had dinner together, and spent some time talking. Did you learn anything more about the match you were watching?"

  Michelle went through the few details she'd learned as she finished cooking, served herself, and sat down at a cheap circular table she pulled from her Inventory. The table was one of a few things that she kept reminding herself to replace, but never did. If she ever found herself in the right store, she probably would; it'd be no problem at all, she just had never gone out of her way. At least the chair she pulled out to match it was decently comfortable, if a bit broken in.

  "I think you're not going to find a lot of runners willing to screw with their skills," Nin said, once Michelle had gotten to that part and stopped to eat some of her dinner. "I know what Jerry said, and it all makes sense, but even though we'd been on break for like a half hour..." Michelle heard Nin trying to avoid the topic, and successfully kept herself from thinking about it, "...I couldn't get into the head-space at all. I was just stressed and scared, and it was a hard thing to wrap my head around."

  "I guess." The advice they'd been given was problematic, but she didn't quite understand the stress angle. Or... maybe she did, but she didn't want to. It certainly required a mindset, though that only...

  She clenched her hand around the chopsticks, but this time, the wave of fear was less crippling, the headache didn't come back as strongly, and she found herself mostly filled with anger, not terror. What was his mindset? Why did it come naturally to him? Why then? Why there?

  "You okay?" Nin sounded concerned. "Do you need me to come over?"

  Michelle recognized her initial instinct to say no as automatic, and considered the question instead. But, in the end, she shook her head. "No," she said. "I... it's not so bad right now. I think it's starting to turn into hate instead of fear."

  She didn't read too much into the silence from Nin.

  "I'm gonna come over," Nin decided. "With Reese. Do you mind?"

  Michelle started to object, caught herself, and shook her head again. "No," she said. "I don't mind."

  "We'll be there in about twenty."

  "I know." Michelle hung up, looking at the broken chopsticks in her hand. She hadn't felt them break or give way, though she couldn't be surprised they had. They weren't anything Dungeon-ish, as most of her cooking and eating stuff wasn't. They hadn't been the cheap disposable ones, but in the grand scheme of things, all chopsticks were disposable, and they hadn't exactly been expensive.

  She dropped the debris onto the table, pulled out another set, and finished her meal. Since Reese would be there, she ended up bringing out a love seat and coffee table to join the couch in the living room, then packed away the rest of what she cooked for later and cleaned up. Although it felt weird to her, despite her level, she unlocked the front door and left it like that before settling in.

  She ended up bringing out Fang while she waited, the young Dragon somehow noticing her stress level and settling in next to her on the couch.

  It didn't turn out to be a silent wait, as an argument broke out next door. It wasn't something special – it sounded like yet another teenage rant from their daughter on one side, and on the other, the two parents telling her to do her school work anyway. Or something like that.

  School. With the world as it was now. With people dying, and Dungeoneers sometimes smashing things up, here in the real world. What would she think about it all if she was still in high school right now? Probably that she needed to go get levels in a Dungeon just to protect herself. Or else she'd be fantasizing about some strapping swordsman she'd meet in the Dungeon.

  Yeah, that was what she'd be thinking. She could picture the type she'd been into at that age; her tastes had shifted more than changed. And Jon... had never been that. The closest he'd come was promising to take care of her.

  What a fucking liar.

  Michelle heard Reese's voice through the wall before they got to her door, and called, "It's open." When Fang started to sit up, she whispered, "Reese is the big black guy. He's cool too." Her dragon turned and gave her an eye, then turned his attention to the door as the two came in.

  "Hey Chelle," Nin said as she came in, lifting a plastic bag. "We're a little late because I stopped for snacks. I know you had dinner, but there's always room for chocolate." She stepped back so that Reese could come through, and shut the door behind them both. "Hey! Fang!"

  "That's your new pet Mob, huh?" Reese came forward, and squatted down on the balls of his feet short of the couch, still not quite level with the beast that looked back at him. "The palette swap is subtle, but it looks good on him."

  Fang seemed to consider those words, and with all the dignity of a cat, decided he no longer cared about the two intruders. He stretched only slightly, turned slightly, and laid back down beside her.

  "I think Jerry might have just used cats as a model for dragons," Michelle said, reaching down to stroke him.

  "Yeah, except he actually listens. I'm not sure any cats do that." Nin dropped the plastic bag on the coffee table, and stood there looking at Michelle for a moment before dropping into the love seat and patting the cushion next to her. Reese took that as his cue to un-squat and move to sit.

  Michelle decided to take this as the invitation it was, and changed the subject. "What will you be doing with your sister tomorrow, Reese?"

  "Shopping for her kids," Reese said, the words slightly interrupted as he sat. "Mostly Ramone, since I'll likely end up missing his birthday, but she says they've both been good lately. I'll decide that for myself when I get a chance to spend more time with them. Knowing her, we'll also do some clothes shopping at the same time." He scratched his neck. "She actually asked me before the last Run, but we'd already scheduled it by then..."

  Michelle could forget for the moment that the distractions wouldn't fix anything, and just embraced being with her friends. Sometimes, she figured, that's all you can do.